John Backus
John Backus
John Warner Backuswas an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming languageand was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form, a widely used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth3 December 1924
CountryUnited States of America
John Backus quotes about
lazy laziness being-lazy
Much of my work has come from being lazy.
school thinking want
They don't like thinking in medical school. They memorize - that's all they want you to do. You must not think.
needs failing willingness
You need the willingness to fail all the time.
writing lazy computer
Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.
law understanding tools
Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language.
ideas doe needs
You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.
learning imagination creative
I, myself, have had many failures and I've learned that if you are not failing a lot, you are probably not being as creative as you could be -you aren't stretching your imagination.